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Jason Slater's Blog
When spam is not spam

By Jason Slater in Reader

Posted in E-Commerce on March 24, 2008 at 9:39 am

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We used to employ a system of automatically rejecting blacklisted incoming email senders. To do this we relied on services such as xBL. The problem we found was that from time to time genuine companies would, for one reason or another, find themselves on these blacklist sites and, even worse, they were not always aware of it. We found this out the hard way because we didn’t process (or deliver) several orders that were contained upon these incoming emails (Managing Incoming Email)- a hard lesson by any standard.

Of course in the ‘old days’ customer orders used to come in physically on paper but these days many are coming in solely via e-mail. I used to advise against this delivery mechanism for something as important as orders using the point that e-mail is not a guaranteed (or reliable) delivery mechanism. As time progressed though, customer requirements demanded that we accept these communications and it’s hard to argue against it when customer orders are at stake. One thing I have found more of recently is that genuine customer orders on incoming e-mail are starting to show up as potential spam. Again, we typically used to reject spam senders but it now looks as if we have to manually trawl through these - and as we get hit with thousands of these e-mails per day the task is rapidly becoming quite time consuming (Guess What

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Lessons in making a multi-lingual website

By Jason Slater in Reader

Posted in Programming, Languages, Internet, E-Commerce on November 23, 2007 at 4:57 pm

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I confess - I only speak one language (excluding programming languages of course!). Some people might even tell you I have difficulty with this one. However, I was still asked to work on the technical angle of converting a website to a multi-lingual website - to include French and German language variations. The actual “language” side would be handled by someone else - phew I thought, oh and apparently the project would be a breeze. Now, the older I get the more worried I look when people tell me things are going to be a breeze because more often than not they aren’t. This was to become no exception.

Finding a translator was simple enough, our local chamber of commerce were very helpful in this respect. I was a little concerned when there was no project meeting, discussion or even email communication to lay out the requirement but as the “language” side was being handled by someone else I was not too concerned. As long as I received the text then the technical implementation should be quite straightforward.

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